FORT COLLINS — If Steve Fairchild were any dryer, he’d be a martini.
On paper, he was the right guy to succeed the iconic Sonny Lubick, who made Colorado State football relevant for the first time in the modern era. Fairchild played at CSU, coached there under Lubick and arrived direct from the NFL.
But in the fourth year of a five-year contract, Fairchild is 16-27 after Saturday’s massacre at the hands of No. 5 Boise State. As a result, CSU athletic director Paul Kowalczyk is facing a tough call.
As one student explained it to me after the best performance by a Broncos team in the state of Colorado this year, the athletic department appears to love Fairchild; the student body, not so much.
Let’s say CSU manages three wins in its six remaining games, finishes 6-6 and goes to a minor bowl. Kowalczyk will have three choices: Fire Fairchild, give him a contract extension or send him out to recruit in the final year of his deal.
“We’ll sit down at the end of the season,” Kowalczyk said before Saturday’s 63-13 undressing of Fairchild’s team. “I purposely didn’t set out a specific number of wins or any kind of specific goals for postseason because to me it’s an evaluation process that’s ongoing. It’s not just what your win-loss is. There are things that go on behind the scenes that most people don’t know. And that’s all part of the process as well.
“You’ve got people who pull triggers after three years, you’ve got people who, like Virginia Tech stuck with Frank Beamer after seven, finally started winning and now he’s a coaching icon. So there are two sides to that coin.”
That makes it sound like Kowal- czyk is leaning toward sticking with Fairchild. But when I asked him how he would go about growing fan, alumni and booster support for the program, he struck a slightly different note.
“The bottom line with all of this is if you want to have the kind of support you really need to run a program like this, you need to be successful. You need to win and not just be 6-6. That’s average. That’s not going to get you anywhere.
“So we recognize that. But this is a process. Since I’ve come here (in April 2006), we’ve had to restart three major programs: men’s basketball, women’s basketball and football. It takes time. There are no easy solutions and no quick solutions.
“Right now, we’ve got fans on both sides of the aisle, quite honestly. We have some that are questioning what’s going on and we have some that are still supportive of what’s happening. I think we need to let this thing play out.”
Watching the Rams from afar — and full disclosure, Saturday was the first time I’d been to Sonny Lubick Field since Sonny was coaching there — the most distressing thing is the failure to convert improved recruiting into improved play.
“We have a very young team right now,” Kowalczyk said. “If you look at our two-deep, last time I checked, it was like 29 out of 44 freshmen and sophomores.”
That’s a pretty good excuse, and I try not to hold Fairchild’s congenital lack of charisma against him. But I keep wondering when it’s appropriate to expect heralded second-year quarterback Pete Thomas to start making big plays. Saturday, he had several chances to hit receivers who got behind the Boise State defense and overthrew them all.
“He’s fine,” Fairchild said. “He’s the least of our worries. He certainly didn’t get a few deep balls in there today, but we’re lucky to have Pete Thomas. He’s going to be a good player for us. He is a good player for us. He’s still a second-year kid out of high school. I’m real happy with the way he’s playing.”
The upside of adding a top national program like Boise State to your conference is it gives you a way to measure your progress. The downside is it gives you a way to measure your progress.
By early in Saturday’s third quarter, the roads were already full of fans leaving the scene. By the fourth, the CSU band was playing to itself.
For Rams football to be relevant again, somebody has to bring the buzz back. I admire Kowalczyk’s patience, but Fairchild is running out of time to prove he’s the right man for that job.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
